Tag: children’s literature

A body of work rather than a shelf of novels

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Rosemary Sutcliff – historical novelist and children’s book writer – is the object of an essay by John Rowe Townsend in his 1971 book  A Sense of Story —as blog reader and commenter Anne highlights at another post.  She notes that his observation that Rosemary Sutcliff’s books amount to  “a body of work rather than a shelf of novels” is is taken from what she refers to as the essay’s “wonderfully striking and poetic introduction”:

Day to day, minute to minute, second to second the surface of our lives is in a perpetual ripple of change. Below the immediate surface are slower, deeper currents, and below these again are profound mysterious movements beyond the scale of the individual life-span. And far down on the sea-bed are the oldest, most lasting things, whose changes our imagination can hardly grasp at all. The strength of Rosemary Sutcliff’s main work—and it is a body of work rather than a shelf of novels—is its sense of movement on all these scales. Bright the surface may be, and vigorous the action of the moment, but it is never detached from the forces underneath that give it meaning. She puts more into the reader’s consciousness than he is immediately aware of.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet in critic Julia Eccleshare’s Top Ten Children’s Books

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Rosemary Sutcliff's Warrior Scarlet hardback coverWarrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is recommended by Julia Eccleshare, children’s books editor of the Guardian newspaper, as one of her  Top Ten Children’s Books in Babyccino Kids, ‘an international lifestyle website for modern mums’:

… true burning Warrior Scarlet … was the very colour of courage itself. No woman might wear the colour, nor might the Half People who came and went at the Tribe’s call. It was for the Men’s side.

Warrior Scarlet, published in 1957,  is indeed  a wonderful historical novel, illustrated by Charles Keeping. Of the story, Julia Eccleshare writes:

Rosemary Sutcliff had an exceptional ability to bring the past to life; in Warrior Scarlet it is the Bronze Age. Drem needs to kill a wolf to become a man of the tribe. How he first fails and then succeeds in doing so despite his withered arm is a moving story about overcoming adversity.

Julia Eccleshare compiled  1001 Children’s Books: You Must Read Before You Grow Up,

Legacy of Rosemary Sutcliff and The Eagle of the Ninth | Sandcastle or Temple to Mithras?

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Rosemary Sutcliff relished the imagination and creativity of children, as well as readers’ responses to her novels. Writing in Books for Keeps, Brian Alderson, former Children’s Books Editor of The Times, recalled an anecdote which dates from some time after the publication of The Eagle of the Ninth in 1954. Rosemary recounted to a ‘bevy of librarians’:

‘That’s not a sand-castle,’ said the busy child on the beach, ‘I’m building a temple to Mithras’!

He commented that

In all probability the temple-builder’s enthusiasm for the work came from hearing its famed serialisation on ‘Children’s Hour’ but (perhaps unlike television serials) the wireless version sent listeners straight back to the book to get the author’s full-dress narrative to go with the spoken one.

Source: Classics in Short No.80

Rosemary Sutcliff favourite Rudyard Kipling born 30th December

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Rosemary Sutcliff loved the work of Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, she wrote a monograph about him. Today (30th December) was his birthday (in 1865). She herself wrote in 1965 (I now realise perhaps to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth) in The Kipling Journal of the Kipling Society:

… other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out … I was something under six when my mother first read The Jungle Books to me. They were my first introduction to Kipling, and perhaps for that reason, they have an especial potency for me. From the first, I had an extraordinary sense of familiarity in the jungle; I was not discovering a new world but returning to a world I knew; and the closest contact I ever made with a ‘Story book Character’, I made with Bagheera, the black panther with the voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree and the little bald spot that told of a collar, under his chin.

Rosemary Sutcliff novels and the North-East of England

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels and children’s books were  highlighted by Alan Myers who compiled an A to Z of the many writers who had a significant connection with the North-East of England. By 2008 (when I first posted this) I thought it had disappeared from the web but no, it is here.

One of the most distinguished children’s writers of our times, (some of ) Rosemary Sutcliff’s  …  books … (are now) considered classics. She sets several of her best-known works in Roman and Dark Age Britain, giving her the opportunity to write about divided loyalties, a recurring theme. The Capricorn Bracelet comprises six linked short stories spanning the years AD 61 to AD 383, and Hadrian’s Wall features in the narrative.The Eagle of the Ninth (1954) is perhaps her finest work and exemplifies the psychological dilemmas that Rosemary Sutcliff brought to her novels. Read More »